Semantic Web in in the Context Broker Architecture

This document describes a new architecture that exploits
Semantic Web technologies for supporting pervasive
context-aware systems. This architecture called Context
Broker Architecture (CoBrA) differs from other architectures
in using theWeb Ontology Language OWL for modeling
ontologies of context and for supporting context reasoning.
Central to our architecture is a broker agent that
maintains a shared model of context for all computing entities
in the space and enforces the privacy policies defined
by the users when sharing their contextual information. We
describe the use of CoBrA, its associated ontologies, and
its privacy protection mechanism in an intelligent meeting
room prototype.